In Fiji, when breadfruit trees bear more fruit than usual, it is at once a gift and a warning sign: Hurricane season will be dire. As a child, Robert Oliver watched people bury the fruit in pits lined with banana leaves. After the storms passed, they dug them up, now fermented, and put them straight on the fire to cook. This was how generations survived. Reportedly, breadfruit from a pit dating back three centuries was discovered to be still edible — to have defied time.
But in the past few decades, the ingredients Oliver grew up with have been displaced. Stores in Fiji and across the Pacific are now filled with the same kinds of foods found everywhere, emblems of Western modernity: instant, highly processed, stripped of almost all nutrition. It is no coincidence that rates of chronic disease have skyrocketed. “This is not nourishment,” Oliver writes in “Eat Pacific,” a collection of recipes from and inspired by “Pacific Island Food Revolution,” a TV cooking competition he has hosted since 2018. (The first two seasons are on YouTube.)
Recipe: Ipo Pain Perdu (Coconut-Bread French Toast)
Here is the back of a giant blade smacked against a coconut, the squeeze of pulp in a fist, the snowy cream running down into a bowl. Contestants from Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and, in Season 3, Papua New Guinea work mostly in makeshift kitchens open to the air. In the middle of a challenge, one runs into the surrounding trees to pluck wild berries she says she hasn’t seen since she was a little girl. A team tucks hot volcanic rocks into a dish and laments that their coconuts are uto — sprouted — so they have less meat. When Princess Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tuita of Tonga makes an appearance, there is a ripple of awe. “We’re jittery,” a contestant confides. Another, speaking in Tongan, says quietly, “To cook for the princess — it is a joyous occasion for my life.”
A prompt from a recipe collector: ‘Write like you’re writing a love letter to your country.’
The format is “Top Chef,” but the mission is reclamation. And it is working: According to a 2021 impact report by the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics based in Nairobi, Kenya, an astounding 83 percent of the Pacific island population has watched the show, and many say it’s changing how they eat. It has inspired spinoffs, including the UNICEF-sponsored “Pacific Kids Food Revolution” and “Sanma Food Revolution,” a roadshow on the island Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu that rolls through villages, taking cooking demonstrations to churches and schools.
Last year, Oliver was asked on New Zealand radio if he had plans for a cookbook based on the show. Within an hour, he started getting messages. “We want to be in it, too,” he recalls people saying. He didn’t have much of a budget, so he made a template for cooks and coached them over Zoom on how to take cellphone photos of the dishes. For the accompanying text, he told them, “Write like you’re writing a love letter to your country.”
One contributor, Heimata Hall, who runs food tours on his native Mo‘orea in French Polynesia, offered a recipe for Tahitian ipo, coconut bread, cobbled together from watching aunties who knew how to make it by feel, not measurement. The dough, rich with grated coconut and coconut milk, should be as sticky as possible — so sticky that you think it must need more liquid, but no.
There are versions in which ipo is baked or boiled. Hall prefers steaming because it holds in moisture and gives the bread a smooth, clean finish. As an experiment, he tried it as pain perdu, or what Americans know as French toast, which traditionally would call for crusty French bread. He cut thick slabs of ipo and dunked them in coconut milk — just enough so they were coated but not sopping — and then in egg. He brushed the pan with butter (not too much), to crisp the outside and caramelize the coconut.
This was another form of reclamation, taking a recipe from a colonial power and reimagining it with local ingredients. “There’s a story here about who we are,” Hall says. “It’s a story I have to tell.”
Recipe: Ipo Pain Perdu (Coconut-Bread French Toast)
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